There was no living Latin drama when Horace penned his epistle on poetry, and the theaters of Rome were given over to unliterary spectacle. It is unlikely that Horace had ever had occasion to see a worthy play worthily acted. No doubt he had read the works of the great Greeks, but that could not disclose to him the full emotional force of their dramas revealed only by actual performance. To judge a play by reading it is like judging a picture by a photograph. The greater the drama the more completely does it put forth its power when it is made to live by the actor in the theater and before the audience. As a result of Horace’s lack of experience as a spectator, what he has to say about the principles of playmaking has little validity. He is not exercising his own keen critical faculty; he is merely echoing the opinions of Alexandrian criticasters. His counsel to aspiring dramatists was not practical; it was academic in the worst sense of the word. In fact, Horace was only going through the motions of giving advice, since there were no aspiring dramatists in Rome, as there were then no stages on which a play could be acted and no company of actors to perform it. A comparison of the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle with the ‘Art of Poetry’ of Horace is as amusing as it is profitable. Aristotle is the earliest and the shrewdest of dramatic critics. Horace had no intimacy with the theater. Horace is sketching from a lay-figure in a studio, whereas Aristotle is drawing from the living model in the open air. When Aristotle discusses the effect of an episode upon an audience, we can be sure that he himself was once one of that audience, and that his memory had retained the intonations and the gestures of the actors as well as the unformulated response of the spectators to the emotional appeal of the plot. Aristotle is as insistent in taking the audience in account as Sarcey was; and his dramatic criticism is as technical as Sarcey’s. Horace had never thrilled to a situation as it slowly unfolded itself in the theater; and therefore what he has to say about the principles of playmaking is more or less beside the mark. It is hit or miss; it may be right or it may be wrong; it is supported by no understanding of dramaturgy; it is undramatic criticism.